Trinity Church and the wages of neglect

The interior of Trinity Church on Trinity Church on Tuesday, July 12, 2011, days before it was demolished by city officials. (Erin Colligan / Times Union)

The demolition of Pennsylvania Station in the early 1960s, one of the great works of McKim, Mead and White, was an act of vandalism on a massive scale that shocked those who care about America, its cities, its architecture, and its historical past; out of that tragic loss came the preservationist movement and organized efforts to save buildings of architectural and historical importance.

Among the important preservationist architects nationally is an Albanian, John Mesick, whose office is on Broadway, across from the Delaware and Hudson Building. John Mesick and others were discussing endangered Albany buildings eight or nine years ago when John said that of all the Albany buildings that needed to be saved the one that he was most concerned about was James Renwick’s 1848 Gothic revival church on Trinity Place, Trinity Episcopal Church. I agreed with him, and so too did others who were there.

I had been to Trinity Church a few weeks before, and took slides of it. It had been closed and boarded up many years ago and was a sorry sight to behold, with weeds growing out of the the building, a strange contrast to the cast iron plaque designating the building as dating from 1848, the same year that construction began on the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, up the hill from Trinity.

The Mesick firm undertook an astonishingly ambitious restoration project, headed by Larry Wilson, that has gone through several stages and is now complete. The Catholic diocese had to make a decision either to demolish the Cathedral or save it; it did the latter, largely at its own expense. The results are wonderful; one of Albany’s architectural monuments has been saved. Alas, another is now being razed after the collapse of the interior of Trinity Episcopal.

This is a tragedy, and it need not have happened.

The architect of Trinity, James Renwick, was one of the most important American architects of his generation. His first major commission was Grace Epoiscopal church in NYC, which dates from 1843. He won the competition for the design of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846, a building of great architectural and historical importance. Renwick then won the competition for St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Ave. in NYC in 1853; it is among the largest and most important of all American Gothic revival churches. Trinity Episcopal falls into the most productive and important years of Renwick’s fabled career; his legacy has just been diminished by the loss of his only Albany building.

The loss of Trinity is not only architectural; it removes a connection that linked Albany to one of the great achievements of nineteenth-century America, the Smithsonian Institution, whose first Secretary, Joseph Henry, was an Albanian. Henry conducted an experiment in Academy School, Philip Hooker’s 1814 building in Academy Park that led to the telegraph and to modern communications systems; he is one of America’s most important nineteenth scientists; he went from Academy to Princeton University and from there to the Smithsonian Institution, which he headed, a remararble achievement. The Smithsonian Institution building where Joseph Henry assumed his duties was designed by James Renwick.

The tragic loss of Trinity Church is symptomatic of Albany’s—and America’s—baffling and lamentable indifference to its architectural legacy, and to the history with which that legacy is bound up. Indeed, the city of Albany exemplifies much that has gone wrong in our cities in the second half of the twentieth century, when what went under the name of urban renewal resulted in massive demolition of nineteenth-century buildings, many of architectural importance, and of entire neighborhoods. Nowhere did this happen on the same scale as in Albany.

I was stationed in Stuttgart, Germany between 1954 and 1956, as a soldier in the US Army. When I arrived in Stuttgart much of the inner city was rubble from World War II; when I left the rubble had been cleared away and new buildings had gone up; the city rose, phoenix-like from the ashes of destruction. I returned to Stuttgart twenty years later and did not recognize the city. Many of the buildings that had gone up when I was there had been demolished and replaced by replicas of the buildings that had been destroyed in World War II; pre-War Stuttgart had been restored; the inner core was cordoned off and set aside for pedestrian use. This happened throughout Europe; to the extent that was possible, pre-war Warsaw was restored at great cost and with great care.

In Albany, during the same period that European cities were being restored, the exact opposite happened. 90 acres of inner-city Albany was demolished, displacing some 3,000 families and some 12,000 people. All that was demolished was from the nineteenth century; many of Albany’s monuments—churches, fine houses, entire neighborhoods—were destroyed. This was demolition on a massive scale.

How one regards the Empire State Plaza is a personal matter; architectural critics were by and large harsh when they rendered their judgments; for many, Albany became an object of mirth and a warning sign of what could go wrong when politicians and their accomplices have their way. When local initiatives aren’t sufficient to save buildings worth saving only the city can take a position of leadership. This is what was needed to save Trinity Episcopal; this isn’t what happened, tragically. And steps could have been taken; Trinity could have been saved and put to positive use when the Episcopal diocese closed its doors. At that point the city should have intervened; it should have recognized the architectural importance of Trinity and it should have recognized its importance to the neighborhood in which it had long been an anchor, important to the life of the community.

Albany and cities everywhere in America should consider possible uses for churches when their doors are shut;. An Episcopal church in Cohoes is now a public library; such uses are available for churches that were built in response to community needs. Needs change; adaptations are essential, one can only hope that the tragic end of Trinity Episcopal will force Albany to rethink its priorities.

I don’t know if the windows in Trinity are Tiffany windows, but I might mention that Ttrinity was built in the year of Tiffany’s birth, 1848. The windows could have been made and installed later, and probably were. I could tell at a glance if the windows were by the Tiffany studio, or are in the Tiffany style. The standard book of Tiffany windows by Alistair Duncan doesn’t include Trinity as an Albany church that has (had) Tiffany windows.

I was involved a number of years ago with a not-for-profit organization that had a passing interest in an adaptive re-use of the Trinity building. While it was not the deciding factor in the organization’s decision to look elsewhere, the laissez-faire attitude of the City of Albany toward the building and its ultimate fate was terribly depressing to me at the time. While I’m no real student of architecture, I could sense that this was a special building, and I’m sure that in the past 20 years, had the City worked at finding a new user more assiduously, Trinity Episcopal could have found a fate more worthy of its origin and intent than the wrecking ball.

This has been an awful year for Upstate New York’s historic churches in general. You may have seen the recent articles on the pending demolition of Fort Plain’s magnificent Church of the Messiah (1896), which, like Trinity, was recently auctioned off by the city for $500.

So when do we tear down Empire Plaza and rebuild old Albany? I am much for it. Empire Plaza reminds me of the insanity of Eastern Europe communist building style a la Ceaucescu in Romania. Empire State Plaza is one of the worst eye sores I have ever seen, totally disconnected from the architecture surrounding it and each time I go there it is nothing more than a lifeless shell.
I know it will never happen, but there are plenty of historic buildings in downtown that seem to be left to rot and collapse. What is needed is a comprehensive program that mandates maintenance of historic structures and makes it more interesting for owners to do so by providing funds that will lower the higher expenses to be on par with any other building. This concept works in many European countries and helps preserving history and identity….unless we consider out identity to be yet another Dollar store.

Where was Historic Albany in all this? – the church wasn’t even on its last list of most endangerd places! Even if it partially collapsed it could still have been stabilized and maybe the wooden parts and windows stored until such time as they could replaced. It could even have been sold off to another congegation like the one in Sandy Springs, Georgia looking to buy a New York State church. I’m sure lots of cities would have appreciated having a Renwick Church even if Albany didn’t.

Clearly we need some sort of preservation leadership in this city if anything is to survive.